Government 2.0

Lindsay Tanner announced yesterday a taskforce to investigate the use of Web 2.0 technologies by Government.

You can go visit the taskforce's blog but it does raise an interesting question, which is why are we doing this as a taskforce on Government 2.0 rather than just keep going on trying it? We've already seen the Department of roadband, Communications and the Digital Economy try a blog. It got a bit swamped with anti-filtering campaigners. Very disappointingly the new blog has already received one such quote.

It is an interesting question of why the taskforce hasn't been graced with a *.gov.au domain name.

Another comment has also been on one of the substantive issues of the DE blog on the use of public sector information. The post is interesting and conflicts quite strongly with the last two decades of "cost recovery charging" in public sector agencies. Two agencies come in for a serve - the ABS and PSMA.

I've talked about both lately. The ABS issue does raise an interesting question about the possibility of providing the much hyped Wolfram Alpha for ABS data. Google wants to make the world's information accessible, Wolfram wants to make it computable!

We'll see how the taskforce goes....